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C is for crime: Cookie Monster holds stolen gold cracker for ransom

Following an audacious heist that makes the recent Smurf assault seem like small portabellas, police in Hannover, Germany, are on the crumb-littered trail of a missing cookie -- a 44-pound golden cookie. The prime suspect? A certain blue-furred compulsive eater by the name of Cookie Monster.

The gilded bronze sculpture was stolen early this month from a 100-year-old sculpture atop the headquarters of German baker Bahlsen (below), leaving authorities puzzled. While Cookie Monster adamantly denied any involvement in the crime -- "Me no steal the golden cookie. But me willing to help find real cookie thief!" -- not even the promise of a $1,350 reward for information could turn up anything about the real culprit.

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But then on Tuesday, someone stepped forward with some demands. Some very delicious demands.

That's when the local newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung received a wonderfully cliche extortion letter -- complete with letters cut from magazines! -- from someone identifying himself, or herself, as "Krümel Monster" (Cookie Monster). And lest anyone think he's less than genuine, he included a photo of himself in a low-budget Cookie Monster costume chomping down on what appears to be the missing sculpture.

"I have the biscuit!" the letter proclaims. "You want it and therefore you want on one day in February to give biscuits to all the children in Bult hospital. But those with milk chocolate, not those with dark chocolate and not those without chocolate. And a golden biscuit for the child cancer ward."

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Clearly Cookie Monster has more discerning tastes than Sesame Street has led us to believe.

In case anyone doubts the sincerity of his demands -- Really, how could you? Just look at that face! -- Cookie Monster adds, "This is serious! Otherwise it will end up with Oscar [the Grouch] in the dustbin, really!!!"